Data and Knowledge Bases

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Research activities

The research activities of the group are oriented mainly in three directions:

1) Theoretical and application-oriented aspects of visual formalisms for databases and database design;
2) Design and performance modelling of parallel and distributed database systems;
3) Database modeling, cooperative information systems, data integration, data warehouses and data mining, semi-structured data modeling.

The main research topics are: Visual Query Languages and Interfaces, Databases and the Web, Heterogeneous and Cooperative Database Systems, 2D and 3D Data Visualization, Adaptive Interfaces, Visual Metaphors, Controlled Studies and Usability Testing, Query Language Expressive Power, Data Modeling, Data Warehousing, Parallel Database Systems, Query Optimization, Workflow Management Systems, Semi-structured Data, Data Integration.

Besides several publications in international journals and conferences, the group has also designed and implemented several prototypes of visual interfaces for database access, such as QBD* and QBI, which have been transformed into industrial products by an italian software company.

Members of the group

• Carlo Batini
• Diego Calvanese
• Tiziana Catarci
• Maurizio Lenzerini
• Silvio Salza
• Giuseppe Santucci

Selected papers

Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Maurizio Lenzerini, Moshe Y. Vardi: Answering Regular Path Queries Using Views. ICDE 2000: 389-398.

Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Maurizio Lenzerini, Moshe Y. Vardi: View-Based Query Processing for Regular Path Queries with Inverse. PODS 2000: 58-66.

Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Maurizio Lenzerini: Representing and Reasoning on XML Documents: A Description Logic Approach. Journal of Logic and Computation 9(3): 295-318 (1999).

Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Maurizio Lenzerini, Daniele Nardi, Riccardo Rosati: Data Integration in Data Warehousing. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. To appear (2000).

Matthias Jarke, Maurizio Lenzerini, Yannis Vassiliou, Panos Vassiliadis: Fundamentals of Data Warehouses. Springer Verlag (2000).

Tiziana Catarci: What Happened When Database Researchers Met Usability. Information Systems 25(3): 177-212 (2000).

Tiziana Catarci, Daniele Nardi, Giuseppe Santucci, Shi-Kuo Chang: WAG: Web-at-a-Glance. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 7(2-3): 187-214 (1998) Tiziana Catarci, Giuseppe Santucci, John Cardiff: Graphical Interaction with Heterogeneous Databases. VLDB Journal 6(2): 97-120 (1997).

Silvio Salza, Giovanni Barone, Tadeusz Morzy: A Distributed Algorithm for Global Query Optimization in Multidatabase Systems. ADBIS 1998: 95-106.

Silvio Salza, Massimiliano Renzetti: A Modeling Tool for Workload Analysis and Performance Tuning of Parallel Database Applications. ADBIS 1997: 152-161.

Other activities

The group has organized several international and national scientific events, including:

• International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, CoopIS-99, Edinburgh, 1999.
• International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER-99, Paris, 1999.
• IFIP 2.6 Conference on Visual Database Systems (VDB5), Japan, 1999.
• The AVI (Advanced Visual Interfaces) international conference series (AVI'92, '94, '96, '98, 2000).
• International Conference on Very Large Database, VLDB2001, Roma, 2001.
• Knowledge Representation Meets Databases, KRDB-01, Roma, 2001.
• International Conference of Database Theory, 2003.

Ongoing research projects

• Data Warehouse Quality (DWQ, Esprit).
• Libraries and Archives Collecting Newspaper Clippings Unified for their Integration into Networks (LAURIN, Telematics Program, Libraries Project LB-5629/, http://laurin.uibk.ac.at)
• From Data to Information (MURST).
• Plinius (MURTS, "Programma Multimediale nell'evoluzione verso UMTS, linea di Ricerca Applicazione ai Beni Culturali").
• "Analisi, visualizzazione di informazioni ed interrogazione visuale in basi di dati per il monitoraggio clinico" (MURST).

Cooperation with other research groups

The gorup has established cooperation with several institutions, including: University of Pittsburgh, USA, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Iasi CNR, Pictorial Laboratory at the Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita' di Bari, Autorita' per l'Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione, Universitade Federal de Paraiba, Technical University of Poznan, DEIS, Universita' della Calabria, Rice University, Huston, USA, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA, University of Aachen, Germany.